That notwithstanding, it is January, and so I am determined. This year will be the year I get back to posting regularly and making jewelry out of all those sparkly and stringy things I acquired before I had a baby and the tremors took my hands (unrelated but complementary obstacles).

Maybe I’ll figure out why you can’t post links in my comments. And why I only get notified about comments from first-time posters. This is sounding like “uninstall all your plugins” territory, isn’t it?

I don’t know if this will turn out as well as I think it might, but I might have the kid live-blog (I mean, through me) American Idol once it gets past Hollywood week. His commentary was astonishing last year, but of course he’s now 5 and possibly too mature and/or jaded to have the same effect. We’ll see.

I am going to post this now without even proofing it. Such is my dedication. You’re welcome.

But what I *did* manage to do is build a new little site; it’s called Waterloo Sunset and is a tribute to the song of the same name. I’m rather pleased with it.

This morning, W. and I were playing in the courtyard of a closed museum down the street. Across the street, a church service let out.

“Mommy, are those Presidents?”
“Presidents? No, they’re people leaving church.”
“Oh.”

[After a minute]
“Why did you think they were Presidents?”
“Because they’re wearing President clothes.”

Suits.
President clothes.

I am so pleased with that.

The following YouTube video is here for a different reason. I could totally find better footage/audio of Duke Special for you, even streaming free, but that material would not provide the additional pleasures of staring at the screen throughout, thinking, “Why is this happening? In this place? There must be a backstory that makes sense… oh, wait, I think I have it – no, no that doesn’t work.” (There are five more parts to the story if you find that you enjoy the game as much as I did, or if you’re just digging the concert.)

(I feel as if I should hold an “explain this video” contest, but we all know I’d forget to put the prize in the mail. Feel free to play anyway!)

Well, three days ago I set a completely deluded deadline; I was going to have the new fringehead.com rebuilt using a totally new-to-me technology before the end of 2009.

After several days of manuals, forums and staring blankly with an attractively furrowed brow, I realized something. Just because I think that Joomla! might be a great solution for a site I’m planning later and that this will be good practice does not mean that, for this single-author blog project, I am not trying to beat a gnat to death with one of those huge clown-car hammers.

So, with hours to spare, I made a bold decision to switch horses in midstream and go with WordPress. I’ve used it, I like it, and – here’s the important part – it’s actually built for blogging. (Hey, it could be worse – I could’ve tried to build it in GarageBand.)

WP installation and configuration could not have been easier. Seriously. If you’re thinking of blogging, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

BUT.

Very, very late in the game, I realized that it had been so long since I used my old blog – from which I needed to copy all my old posts, links, etc. – that I hadn’t the first idea how to log in. I thought I remembered my username and password, I just didn’t know where to go with that information.

After an hour of searching through every suspicious file on my site from the admin side and hand-typing the URL that would theoretically lead to that file, I found it. So the problem is, in general, solved. But there’s no way I’m gonna have all this done by midnight.

So, um, welcome to the new fringehead.com. There’ll be words and stuff here soon. Pretty colors, don’t you think?

Happy New Year!

Edit: Well, look at that – once I figured out the MT stuff, this was crazy fast as well. I still have to reconstruct my blogroll though – I don’t really want you to go to Development Blog.

My intention over the next week or so is to finish them all up – well, the ones that are still worth posting – and get them up here. This may not happen, because my arm could get worse again, but I’m going to try. The reason I tell you this is that I don’t want anyone to suddenly log on to 15 new entries and think I’ve gone on a coke-fueled blogging tear or anything.

Hey, I think I just named a band in that last sentence!

To those of you to whom I owe email – same excuse and proposed solution applies. Sorry! I love you! Please come back!

It’s hard to believe I haven’t been doing this for ages, given my affinity for such things as bragging about my child, spending way too much time on the Internet, and writing in general; also, I generally hop on new tech-related trends well before the New York Times completely misunderstands them, and in the case of parenting blogs (some of my favorite people are “mommy bloggers,” but that doesn’t mean I’m required to use the term nonironically – does it?) I’m at least a year late. Hi. I had a baby. I may never be cutting-edge again. I’m OK with that.

Anyway, if you’re interested in learning what I’m planning to do here, the rest of this entry will explain.

Hi again! You’re intrepid.

So here’s the deal: We’ve recently moved back to Los Angeles, or as I like to call it, the Mother Country. (Well, to be honest, I’ve never called it that at all, largely because it is not a country- I went to public school in the United States and I still know that). But I have deep emotional ties to the place. And for those of you who question whether it’s possible to have deep emotional ties for a surface-heavy city: you clearly haven’t found the right parts of Los Angeles to base your impressions on. It took me a while, too.) We’ve spent the last few years in Small Town That Shall Remain Nameless, most of which I spent realizing the dozens and dozens of ways in which it is entirely inappropriate for me to live in a small town of any sort. It’s almost impossible to find words to convey the depth of my gratitude for being able to move back here. It may in fact be completely impossible; I didn’t try for that long, so I can’t say for certain.

Now that we’re back, I feel as if I actually have enough material to maintain a regular weblog. I’ve posted some irregular baby-update entries at MySpace, because it seemed like it’d be easy, but their blog display is so reader-unfriendly that I could never get too excited about it. Also, a lot of the people I specifically wanted to be able to keep up with the boy’s progress were not all that interested in joining MySpace to do so, which apparently you have to do. Or at the very least, people couldn’t figure out how to read the blog entries without joining, which is bad enough. Anyway, I’ll be reposting those here, appropriately backdated; if you’ve seen them already, this is the real starting place.

In addition to talking about my own personal child, I plan to write about things to do with kids locally, products we’ve loved or hated thus far in the baby-rearin’ process, and even Los Angeles-area entertainment for grownups (I am still a person. Hear me roar. Or something). Watch the bookmarks section as well for useful links covering those things – I have a goal of quasicomprehensiveness (and apparently another goal of inventing words).

So that’s my mission statement. If any part of it interests you, I hope you’ll come back, comment (or lurk – I don’t mind), subscribe, all that good Web 2.0 stuff. If not – what are you still doing here? Bored at the office? Thought so.

Future entries will actually be about stuff.